the wind makes creatures of us all

[lotesse]

My head is going firecrackers over this tumblr post from saathil013 that identifies fanac with the negative space of poetic enjambment, possibly because I have Keats' line about negative capability ("being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts without any irritable reaching after fact and reason") written down at the bottom of my desktop background so that I can always see it there under whatever other windows I've got open. I really, really like the idea of fandom as the inhabitation of negative space, because it gives me language for the common factor in the attraction to negative space that I tend to feel in my engagements with poetry, fanac, meditation, academia, and most of the other things that matter to me in my life.

Fen have the shiniest brains, y'all.

Comments

[princessofgeeks]

Now I have to look up enjambment.

[lotesse]

Enjambment is my favorite thing ever about contemporary poetry. The best way I can think of to explain its cool is - well, so one of the cool things poetry does is add a level of meaning to language. You've got the unit of meaning of the sentence, yes, but with other units - rhymes, meters, most fundamentally line and stanza - layered on top of that. So what enjambment does is to add a pattern of breaks, pauses, and silences on top of grammatical meaning. The best way I know to read contemp poetry is to read for the breaks, big or small, and hang out in the open spaces between the lines.

(Icon used because Krista Ratcliffe has this great reading of ellipses in Woolf as doing something similar - Woolf's ellipses mark the distance, unbreachable, between women's thoughts and their public language.)

[cathexys]

I actually like your image of negative capability MUCH better than that of enjambement.

Also, Miriam Heddy years ago had this really great description of fan writers writing/existing in the interstices...it may have been a post or a comment in one of mine...your thoughts remind me of that. Good stuff!!!

[lotesse]

YES INTERSTICES. I think I remember reading that at some point - thanks for reminding me!

[elspethdixon]

Interesting - I always thought of fanworks as less like modern free verse poetry and more like traditional form poetry (like a sonnet, for example, or, better yet, a sestina or villanelle, since one of things fanfiction does is to repeat stories and tropes over and over and change them slightly each time). Rather than doing whatever you want (as in free verse or original non-genre fic), you have to work within the structures provided by canon (or within genre conventions, if you're writing original genre fic, which I feel like is closer to fanfic than to non-genre original fiction in terms of both its appeal and in what the creative process of writing it is like).

Though of course, form poetry has enjambment, too - it's hard to write a good sonnet without it

[lotesse]

I wonder if this isn't somewhat dependent on the sort of fanwork one does? Thinking about your writing, I can see why stricter forms make sense to you; you tend to write in very formally complete and extended ways, much more novelistically than a lot of fen - certainly more than I do! I feel like the sort of fic-writing that comes easiest to me is more free-verse-like, a making of pretty word-pictures in the margins, populated with odd gaps where I got bored with the plot and skipped it entirely because it's fic so I can if I want to.

(Ironically, I'd much rather read more novelistic stuff - it's just that I'm not much good at making it myself.)